Hiroshima: do the British Members of Parliament remember ?

When Britain’s Prime Minister
Theresa May said she'd press the nuclear button during the July 18 vote on
Trident, what does that mean on the 71st anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing? Trident Part 2. Trident Part 1.

Today, 6 August, is the 71st anniversary of the first
use of a nuclear weapon. Over 140,000 people died when the code-named
"Little Boy" uranium bomb was dropped on the city of Hiroshima in
1945.

In the House of Commons debate, Chris Law, one of the 56
Scottish National Party (SNP) MPs who voted against the government motion to
replace Trident, noted that "no one in this House truly knows what it is
like to experience the horror, shock, pain and loss, and the complete
devastation, of a nuclear strike".

He recalled a survivor from the Hiroshima bombing, Setsuko
Thurlow, who visited Scotland in May, after speaking at the United Nations
Working Group on multilateral disarmament in Geneva. "She could be our
mother, our grandmother, our aunt or our sister. She told us that in the final
year of war in Japan, when she was 13 years old, the first thing she remembers
of the bomb hitting was a blue-white light and her body being thrown up into
the air. She was in a classroom of 14-year-olds, every one of whom died; she
was the only survivor. As the dust settled and she crawled out of that
building, she made out some figures walking towards her. She described them as
walking ghosts, and when some of them fell to the ground, their stomachs, which
were already expanded and full, fell out. Others had skin falling off them, and
others still were carrying limbs. One was carrying their eyeballs in their
hands. So when I hear the Prime Minister today say that she was would be
satisfied to press the button on hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women
and children, I ask her to go and see Setsuko Thurlow—I am sure she would be
delighted to have a discussion about what it is really like to experience a
nuclear bomb. That in itself should be the complete reason why we do not
replace Trident."

Trident. PA/PA Wire/Press Association Images. All rights reserved.

The bomb that destroyed Hiroshima was 8 times smaller than the
100 kiloton nuclear warheads deployed on Trident. And even after the "reductions" that
Theresa May spoke about the UK taking, each of the new submarines is intended
to carry 40 warheads. So, to get this into perspective, if the Prime Minister
authorised one UK submarine to fire all its nuclear weapons, it would be 320
Hiroshimas. Since most of the chosen targets
are in or near cities, the order to fire could cause an unimaginable
humanitarian catastrophe to 320 cities, most of them bigger than
Hiroshima. Her order would be to kill
millions, not just 100,000. And
potentially unleash years of "nuclear winter" and global famine.

The impacts on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, together with updated
studies on the humanitarian risks and consequences of nuclear detonations in
today's world have come to dominate recent UN talks, with the
majority of governments now arguing the need for negotiations to prohibit nuclear
weapons. These UN-based multilateral
efforts were raised during the Trident debate by the Labour Leader, Jeremy
Corbyn, along with SNP and Green MPs. But
their interventions were mocked or drowned out by the majority who seemed stuck
in a Cold War time warp.

The new Prime Minister appeared at first to want to engage with
the arguments, posing several questions on need, costs, alternatives and
disarmament, including "in the light of the evolving nature of the threats
that we face, is a nuclear deterrent really still necessary and
essential?" She delivered her prepared
speech with confidence, but this could not hide the fact that her sturdy
defence of current UK nuclear positioning illustrated the out-dated defence and
foreign policy model on which the decision to renew Trident relies.

What was needed was a critical appraisal of the evidence and
implications relevant to her own questions.
Instead, the Prime Minister resorted to attacking the patriotism of
those who raised alternative perspectives, as when Green MP Caroline Lucas
invited her to consider that if "keeping and renewing nuclear
weapons" were vital to Britain's national security then it would be
logical for all other states to get them.

The logic that Lucas pointed to has been raised time and again
in UN meetings, where concerns have intensified in recent years about the UK's
proliferation-driving rationale for Trident replacement. May did not even attempt to refute this, but
launched an extraordinary attack familiar from the 1980s, accusing Lucas that “she
and some Labour Members seem to be the first to defend the country’s enemies
and the last to accept these capabilities when we need them". Even proponents of Trident replacement were
jarred by this smear tactic, especially since Lucas is widely considered to be
one of the most rational and able MPs in parliament, and had opened with a
gracious congratulation to the Prime Minister on assuming her new role.

Throughout the debate Labour and Conservative MPs preferred
to relive the political
traumas and myths of the 1980s rather than engage with the security
challenges of the 21st century. They used the term "unilateral
disarmament" as an insult. In fact,
apart from the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the only nuclear disarmament
that Britain has engaged in since the 1970s has been unilateral. Unilateral steps have also played a major role
in reducing the US, Russian and French arsenals when the Cold War ended.

When Vernon Coaker, Labour's Shadow Defence Spokesperson before
the 2015 election, said “We can make a choice to disarm unilaterally or
multilaterally, but we live in a more uncertain world", he showed that he was
still trapped in how PM
Margaret Thatcher and then Defence Secretary Michael Heseltine framed their advocacy of more nuclear weapons in the
early 1980s. Recently released Cabinet Papers from that time show how this was a deliberate
PR policy to undermine the growing popularity of peace movement arguments for
nuclear disarmament. In today's reality, unilateral and multilateral
disarmament steps – as well as bilateral (US-Russian) and plurilateral measures
(involving some or all of the nuclear-armed states) – are enshrined in UN and Non-Proliferation
Treaty (NPT) agreements as parallel and complementary approaches – all
valid and necessary to comply with the treaty's disarmament as well as non-proliferation
obligations.

In the six-hour parliamentary debate, most MPs ignored the UN
developments, and behaved as if the NPT permitted or even authorised Britain to
keep and renew nuclear weapons in perpetuity, as Tony Blair had claimed when arguing
for Trident renewal in 2007. He was wrong, as pointed out by two directors
of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Dr Mohamed ElBaradei and Dr
Hans Blix. In fact, the NPT carries a legally
binding nuclear disarmament obligation, which has been strengthened with consensus
agreements in 1995 (when it was extended), 2000 and 2010, to pursue unilateral
as well as multilateral, bilateral and plurilateral nuclear disarmament steps.

Another throwback to the 1980s was the repetition of the phrase "independent
nuclear deterrent" in the motion and dozens of speeches by its supporters.
The Trident
nuclear weapons system is anything but independent, taking even its name from the
US-built and owned Trident D5 missiles that the UK pays to lease from a pool
kept at King's Bay naval base in Georgia. The 'independent
deterrent' mantra doesn't change the facts, but these phrases successfully
enable MPs to avoid inconvenient truths and questions. It was a sobering exercise,
as well as quite funny, to count the continuous in-House deterrent deployments.
Sir Edward Leigh (Conservative) crammed eight repetitions of "independent
nuclear deterrent" into one of the shortest interventions in the debate.
Theresa May referred to Trident as our "deterrent" 33 times in her
speech. Which leaves her and the rest
of us more vulnerable and unprepared for when this deterrent fails to deter.

The danger in this PR jargon is that it gets believed, leading
to complacency and bad decision-making.
When the Prime Minister dramatically answered "yes" to the
question about firing Trident at cities full of people, posed by George Kerevan
(SNP), she added: "The whole point of a deterrent is that our enemies need
to know that we would be prepared to use it."

That was one of the Cold War versions of deterrence theory, but
it's fallen out of favour as it depends on having accurate information and analysis,
unambiguous communications and correct psychology. As these tend to be in short supply at times of
crisis and conflict, Henry Kissinger and others now describe the role of nuclear
weapons in deterrence as "precarious".

In reality, the point about nuclear deterrence is that if a
leader is put in the position of deciding whether to fire these weapons of mass
destruction, deterrence has already failed.
Or else the computers are giving out false information.

The Prime Minister was cheered and congratulated by her
backbenchers. Commending her for her
"strength and clarity", Conservative MP Tom Tugendhat spoke for many
when he said, "Our place is at the top table, guaranteeing the
international order and the freedoms and liberties of our friends. When I hear
talk of unilateral disarmament and appeasement, I hear talk not of honour and
morality but of dishonour and immorality."
In his view, "the capability and purpose of the nuclear deterrent
lies in its not being so measurable or controllable… It works not because of
its first-strike capability—any fool can have a first-strike capability—but in
the second strike. It works not as a weapon of aggression but only as a post
mortem weapon."

Owen Thompson (SNP) highlighted that if the Prime Minister
orders Trident to be fired it would be in retaliation or revenge, and spoke of the
"worldwide famine" that could cause. Thompson was also aware of the
dangers of mistakes and accidents.
Referring to his parliamentary efforts to end the transporting
of nuclear warheads between nuclear bases in England and Scotland, he noted that
these unmarked truck convoys drive through his Midlothian constituency
near Edinburgh: "If we do not have the nuclear weapons, we do not need the
nuclear convoys, and we can reduce the risk to those in our communities."

Risks as well as costs were raised by Crispin Blunt, the Conservative
Chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee. Blunt made three essential arguments for why he would
defy the Conservative whip and vote against his own government: costs of
Trident replacement; opportunity costs - the need to prioritise funding for
Britain's real defence requirements; and technical risks likely to make the
submarines obsolete and unfit for the purpose of deterrence operations. Blunt,
a former army officer and adviser to former Defence Secretary Malcolm Rifkind, had
crunched the government's own numbers, so his calculation that replacing
Trident would cost at least £179
billion was widely quoted. This is not much below the £205
billion estimate from CND, which had added in the cost of decommissioning.

In response to the Prime Ministers who had said "we do not
believe that submarines will be rendered obsolete by unmanned underwater
vehicles or cyber-techniques," Blunt described the development of a host
of technologies that will breach the trumpeted invisibility and invulnerability
of the submarine-based version of "the deterrent" by making the
oceans "transparent", including "distributed censors detecting
acoustic, magnetic, neutrino and electromagnetic signatures, on board unmanned
vehicles in communication with each other, using swarming algorithms and
autonomous operations associated with artificial intelligence, able to patrol
indefinitely and using the extraordinary processing capabilities now available
and improving by the month..." Referring
to history's "dreadnought blind alley", Blunt concluded that replacing
Trident "does not pass any rational cost-effectiveness test".

Regardless of that, for Labour MPs especially, the main
justification for renewing Trident was jobs, with John Woodcock leading the
way. He intervened as often as he could,
mainly to attack his own party's front bench and the SNP. Most MPs gave him kind leeway, recognising
his desperation as the MP for Barrow, where the submarine contracts would
provide jobs in a run-down port that had once had a thriving and diverse
ship-building industry. But over the
years BAE Systems and others had narrowed the options, making Barrow utterly
dependent on BAE defence contracts.
Barrow's vulnerability, however, needs to be viewed in the broader
context of declining defence jobs, as well as the hundreds of thousands of jobs
across all areas of British life that the government put at risk in the Brexit
referendum.

Labour
Party leader,
Jeremy Corbyn, underlined the need for a defence diversification agency to work
with the unions and "support industries that have become over-reliant on
defence contracts and wish to move into other contracts and other work". Ian Blackford (SNP) also put the jobs issue in
context: "investing in conventional defence and taking care of our
responsibilities in respect of terrorism, not investing in rusting hulks that
will do nothing for humanity and nothing for our defence."

He, too, questioned the Prime Minister's determination to press
the nuclear button, asking, "Have we forgotten the lessons of
Hiroshima?"

Part 3 of this series will be published on the 9th August, Nagasaki Day.

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